Orchard Village in east London was built in 2014 as a bold replacement for the notorious Mardyke estate, which provided the setting for the gritty film Fish Tank. But conditions are so bad that some residents think it should be demolished

Colin Nickless and his family moved into their newly built home on the Orchard Village estate in September 2014. They had come to the outer edge of east London to be near a special school for their daughter Ellie, who is autistic and also has cystic fibrosis.

On the face of it, their three-bedroom house – acquired under a shared ownership scheme – was more than satisfactory. Indeed, a year before, the then Tory communities and local government minister Nick Boles had visited Orchard Village, which is in the borough of Havering, and put it in the top five new housing developments in the UK, praising it as “uplifting, fine, bold and human”.